Northeast blackout (2003)
A cascading blackout left 50 million people without power across the Northeast and Midwest. The outage traced to a transmission line failure in Ohio that cascaded across the region.
Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, giving FERC authority to enforce mandatory reliability standards.
Reliability standards became legally binding, shifting grid oversight from voluntary industry cooperation to federal regulation.
Like the blackout, the current change adds federal oversight to the grid. The blackout led to reliability standards; the current change adds cost-effectiveness review of transmission replacements.
